I am struck, in listening to Prof. Landecker’s remarks on the difference between a “biology of history” and a “history of biology,” by the parallels between her thinking and that of Marxist ecologist, Jason W. Moore. In a very recent book, Capitalism in the Web of Life [link: http://www.versobooks.com/books/1924capitalismintheweboflife], Moore proposes an alternative to the Cartesian premises of much ecological thought (Marxist or otherwise) what he describes as “the double internality.” For Moore, “history” is not just human action against a natural backdrop but “the history of a double internality – humanityinnature/natureinhumanity.” Against the “soft dualism” of other approaches, he insists we need to think both “capital’s internalization of nature” and “nature’s internalization of capital.” Nature is not simply a matrix of bounding, exterior forces, but internal to the techniques of capitalism. Though “nature” can’t be swapped out for Landecker’s “biology,” I hope the family resemblance between these distinctions will be apparent.
Such a comparison is relevant because one of the key terms for Moore, as well as for the tradition of Marxist ecological thought, is “metabolism.” An attentive reader of Justus Von Liebig’s works on soil chemistry, Marx borrowed from Liebig the term stoffwechsel, or metabolism (though not more specifically cellular metabolische of Theodore Schwann), and used it to describe human activity in the most expansive sense. Metabolism was Marx’s preferred way to think about the transformative character of human labor: “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” Marx already had a dialectical notion of history and biology somewhat akin to Landecker’s and Moore’s, seeing human nature as historically transformable, just like exterior nature; through metabolic interchange, “[man] acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” No doubt, Marx’s use of metabolism and his interest in Liebig’s writing on agriculture is part of what Landecker describes as a 19th century “politics of hunger, labor and energy”; industrial metaphors of material transport and combustion echo throughout his writing on these themes. And yet, in the emphasis on regulation and mediation, and in the doubleedged sense of action, we may see glimpses of the later homeostatic and informational conceptions of metabolism that Landecker traces back to the concept of “nutrition.”
The “biology of history,” therefore, helps us to think history as in part the recruitment and transformation of natural energies, as the organization of biological forces internal to society. History implies a certain irreversibility, a certain impossibility of going back, and one of the attractions of the term metabolism for Marx is the sense of chemical transformation as irreversible transformation. Chemical reactions work, for the most part, in one direction – they involve arrows rather than equal signs. You cannot break down cement by pouring water on it, and the historical inheritance of capitalism is, more or less, like this cement. Elsewhere, I have argued against what I describe as “the reconfiguration thesis,”[link: http://endnotes.org.uk/en/jasperberneslogisticscounterlogisticsandthe-communistprospect] a position, common among Marxists, that treats the technological mechanisms of capitalism as politically neutral and endlessly reconfigurable, like LEGO blocks with which one can build anything one wants. For these writers, capitalism is a misuse of given technological means, a destructive misuse that has only the enrichment of a few as its aim and the destruction of the ecosphere as its accidental consequence; a revolutionary transformation would allow these technological means to be directed toward human fulfillment, toward real needs and desires, in a manner consistent with ecological stability. This view requires, however, a certain laziness in thinking about the actual, functional character of these technologies and the natural forces they utilize. Technologies and technological ensembles have particular affordances and “disfordances”; they can be used in certain ways and not used in others, and some of these affordances are determined by biology, chemistry, and physics, as much as by social relations. This is one area where, it seems to me, a “biology of history” is crucial to an understanding of history more generally.
For example, technologies which have as their aim an increase in the productivity of labor – this is in some sense the definition of capitalist technology– are based upon knowledge and manipulation of natural forces (the powers of water, of steam, and of the soil). The very first increases of this sort were in agriculture, permitted by the social reorganization of the land and the transformation of peasant plots into larger holdings, run by capitalist producers growing food for the market; under such conditions, more productive systems of crop rotation and mixed farming could be put into use, lowering the price of food and the number of people needed in the countryside. Marx took from Liebig a sense that metabolism had been profoundly disturbed by capitalism – the distance between town and country had created a “rift” in “social metabolism,” taking from the soil vital nutrients which were not returned to it but instead flushed into sewers and rivers and the sea. The result was a crisis of soil fertility and a colonial scramble for fertilizer deposits – first guano, then saltpeter.
In our time, the rift has been both widened and filled in by a number of industrial interventions, chief among these the creation of a process to convert atmospheric nitrogen into biologicallyavailable forms. For Vaclav Smil, artificial nitrogenfixing technology – an extension of the petrochemical and arms industries – has been more significant to human history than “airplanes, nuclear energy, space flight, television, and computers,” allowing agricultural yields to increase massively. This “chemistry of history,” as it were, is indissociable from the ecologically destructive force of the petrochemical industry, just as it is directly connected to the transformation of human diet and health to which Landecker alludes at the end of her talk. A critical “biology of history” of the sort that Landecker’s work makes possible would require an understanding of the ways in which these chemical and biological forces are internal to human society, and part of the historical legacy it imparts; only then, can we imagine what it would it involve (socially and economically, biologically and chemically) to arrange things otherwise.